Quote from The Bioscope, reporting on the world of early and silent cinema:

“What is the finest film reference source on the Web, for all film let alone silent film? With all due respect to the Internet Movie Database, I think it is Cinema Context, a Dutch site created by Karel Dibbets and the University of Amsterdam. Describing itself as “an encylopedia of film culture”, the site documents film distribution and exhibition in the Netherlands in 1896. It does so through four data collections, on films, cinemas, people and companies, derived from painstakingly researched data on nearly all films exhibited in Dutch cinemas before 1960. The research team located film programmes from 1896 onwards in each of the major Dutch cities, entering all film titles, names, dates, cinemas etc, and then ingeniously matched this data to the records of these films on the IMDb.
The result is an incomparably rich resource for tracing films, the performers and the producers across time and territories, opening up whole new areas of analysis. Cinema Context also contains comprehensive data from the files of the Netherlands Board of Film Censors 1928-1960. As the site states: “Cinema Context is both an online encyclopaedia and a research tool for the history of Dutch film culture. Not only can you find information here about who, what, where and when: you can also analyse this information and study patterns and networks. Thanks to Cinema Context, we are now able to expose the DNA of Dutch film culture.” Naturally, it is available in both Dutch and English.
This is the new film research. Every nation should have the same.”

The water-colour drawing of the Rembrandtplein in Amsterdam was made
by Bart Peizel in 1934 (Amsterdam Municipal Archive)

Figures

107235 programmes

45623 films

1646 cinemas

48574 censorship files

4311 men and women

1626 companies

400 cities

from 1896 to the present day

In Memoriam

On Sunday May 28, 2017, Karel Dibbets has passed away. With his pioneering work on the Cinema Context database Dibbets has provided a unique,
internationally recognized contribution to the international, data-driven research into the history of cinema. Shortly before his passing,
he was awarded with the medal of honour from the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam.